Tol recovered his sword and charged, roaring defiance. He had to parry several ferocious swipes of the saw-toothed sword, but succeeded in getting on the ogre’s blind side, and thrust home. His point took the monster under the arm. The ogre shuddered violently and collapsed face down on the ancient pavement.
Panting in the thin mountain air, chest deeply bruised from the blow he’d taken, Tol pulled Early off the ogre’s carcass. Only then did he see the awful wound across the kender’s back made by a desperate swipe of the ogre’s sword.
“Early!” he said frantically. “Can you speak?”
“ Whatcha want to talk about?” Early’s voice was weak and blood flecked his lips.
“Hold on! I’ll bind your wound-”
“Don’t bother. He cannot survive.”
The voice came from Early’s mouth but it was Felryn’s deep, rich tones. Tol regarded the kender with anguish.
“I’m sorry!” he said. “I meant to protect you-both of you!”
“Don’t be foolish,” his old friend replied. “You can’t protect the entire world.” The kender’s back arched in a flash of sudden agony, and Felryn added, “I must go. He hasn’t long… you’ll be on your own soon, my friend. Farewell!”
“Wait, don’t go! I need you!”
Early’s eyes closed. When they opened again, Tol knew Felryn’s spirit had departed and Early was himself again.
“Ain’t that a pain?” Early muttered. “All messed up, and I don’t remember how I got this way.”
“You saved my life.”
“I did?” The kender uttered a cheerful obscenity. “What a story that’ll make. Tell everyone…”
His voice trailed away.
“I will,” Tol vowed and closed Early’s lifeless eyes.
The wound on his shoulder was burning and his ribs ached, but Tol got stiffly to his feet. Sword firmly in hand, he started up the last set of steps. Mist flowed around his ankles. A profound stillness covered the plateau. All he could hear was his own labored breathing and the hollow echo of his booted feet striking stone. This set of steps seemed as long as the first, but they ended at last on a landing smaller than the one before. The fortress loomed just across the landing.
The main gate stood open.
Bright steel flashed to and fro as Tol swept his blade ahead of him in search of unseen enemies. He found only empty air.
Beyond the darkened doorway was a narrow courtyard.
Tall, rounded doorways were cut from the native stone on both sides of the passage. Along the walls were sconces, empty of torches. The sconces seemed of a piece with the walls. The entire fortress had that look, and Tol recalled legends that said the Irda were able to soften stone, mold it to any shape, then harden it again.
A low, indistinct sound from behind one of the doors on his right drew his attention. He kicked open the door. A quartet of shabbily dressed humans, servants by the look of them, were cowering on the floor of the small room. The sight of the bloodstained swordsman set them all to screaming and wailing.
Tol asked them about Mandes but couldn’t make himself heard over their distress. He grabbed the nearest fellow, a man about his own age, shook him hard and repeated his demand for information.
The man ceased his cries but only stared at Tol in mute horror. One of the elder women spoke.
“The aerie, sir! The aerie!” She pointed behind Tol at a collection of towers sprouting from the highest tier of the fortress.
He released his grip, and the hapless servant crumpled bonelessly to the floor. To them all, Tol said, “If you want to live, get out.”
The woman whimpered something about ogres, and Tol told her the two guards were dead. He turned to go as she began organizing her compatriots to flee.
Tol crossed the courtyard and entered the center door in the middle tier of the fortress. Room after room he traversed, all filled with Mandes’s possessions. Rolls of tapestries and carpets, golden bowls, silver pitchers, richly appointed furniture-the ill-gotten gains extorted from the noblest families in Daltigoth piled in careless heaps, seemingly without plan.
Most of the rooms had magical globes to illuminate the way, but these darkened one by one as Tol passed by and the nullstone drained them of power. When he found a corridor lit with simple flaming torches, he took one.
The silence of the fortress wore on his nerves. No whisper of sound penetrated the thick walls; all he heard was his own breathing and the echo of his footsteps. He found himself alternately creeping quietly or stomping deliberately through the empty halls. At one point, he accidentally knocked over a marble statue. It crashed to the floor and broke into large pieces.
“Hear that, wizard? Tol of Juramona is here!” he shouted.
Smashing the figure was so satisfying, he attacked the rest of the statues lining the passage ahead of him. All were female figures, delicately draped or fully nude. He broke one after another, planting a booted foot on the pedestals and sending the alabaster bodies toppling. His destructive fury abated when he reached the final statue. Glancing up at the face of the lone statue standing in a sea of broken alabaster and drifting dust, he paused. Its features reminded him of Valaran, right down to the dimpled smile and the small notch at the top of its left ear.
He looked back over shattered statuary filling the passageway. The heads of two other figures lay nearby-they resembled Valaran as well. All the statues bore her features! Worse, the stumps of broken arms and headless necks were oozing beads of red liquid, exactly the color of blood.
Repulsed, Tol fought free of the debris. It must be an illusion. But the nullstone protected him against illusions, didn’t it? Perhaps Mandes had caused the statues to be filled with real blood in a bizarre attempt to distract Tol from his purpose, but how could he have known that Tol would break them?
Ridding his mind of the distracting questions, Tol knocked the head from the last statue. “Next you, Mandes!”
At the end of the passage, a tightly curved stair rose through a hole cut in the floor above. A glimmer of red was visible beyond the rim of the opening. Tol drew his saber and climbed slowly, keeping the torch low.
The red glow was strange. It quivered like a reflection on a pool of water. A gust of air rushed by Tol’s face and, wary, he halted halfway up the steep stair.
An oozing mass of gel came out of the darkness at the top of the stair. Translucent and thick like the white of an egg, the quaking mass poured down the steps straight at him.
He dropped the torch and fled, wounded shoulder and battered ribs screaming with every hasty footfall. A faint hissing told him the wall of gel was close on his heels. He had no idea whether it was poisonous or if Mandes simply intended to drown him in a gelatinous flood.
Two steps from the bottom, Tol hurled himself into space, landing on the only statue still standing. The heavy statue rocked with the force of the impact but remained upright. Tol wrapped his arms around the headless figure. Clear gelatin, as cold as the deep sea, surged around the pedestal. The level rose higher and higher, but there was no place for Tol to go. He could only watch as waves of cloudy albumen flowed beneath him.
Fortunately, the magical flood never rose above his knees, and soon the flow down the stairs ceased, and the frigid gel vanished entirely. Neither Tol’s clothing nor the stones of the passageway around him showed any signs of dampness. It was as though the stuff had never existed at all.
Tol climbed down gingerly. He took another torch from a sconce and mounted the stairs again. This time the distant red light did not quiver; no murderous gel stood between it and him. He ascended cautiously.
The air in the chamber above was dank and chill. With his torch, he lit sconces along the near wall. Their light revealed a vast, low-ceilinged hall. In contrast to the cluttered rooms below, it was empty. The floor was covered in native slate, and an elaborate design of circles and lines had been drawn in dark red paint on the bluish-gray stone. The red light emanated from the design. In its center, facing away from Tol, sat a high-backed chair. The top of a balding pate was visible over the chair’s back.